Alex Mercer vs The Avengers
by kreite
Summary: The events of Prototype take place in the Marvel universe's version of New York, leaving the fugitive Alex Mercer tenaciously hunted by S.H.I.E.L.D. and Blackwatch after his 'work is done'. Features: Superfamily
1. Prologue

Tony always believed he was a reasonable man, and so strived to meet a reasonable standard of living; even after his falling on such hard times he endeavoured to keep up a modicum of dignity in his everyday doings; he made sure to be the most methodical in his regular scrounging and appropriated his spoils with the less fortunate; whenever he was called on to tell a story around the oil drum-fire he made sure to do his best keep his new friends as entertained as possible; he also considered himself, as the oldest, tacitly responsible for their well being.

When the outbreak began (masked via the media as an errant chemical spill) he voiced the proposition that they should move as far out to the coast as possible, preferably nearby a sufficiently frequented bridge: if whatever the true problem was turned out to be especially deadly he wanted an escape route and after lengthy debate his friends agreed after a glimpse of some news footage through an electronics store window (live film of twitching, blood-coated zombies and what looked like giant skinless gorillas violently eating people has a way of swaying opinion).

Once satisfactory preparations and contingencies had been made they arduously hauled their encampment through the panic-stricken streets into a dank but functional, half-finished hovel underneath one of the pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge to wait, every so often returning to the closest electronics store to keep updated.

There was something in the air, Tony thought: the city had been the subject of significant endangerment plenty of times before and yet there was a lingering, unspoken concurrence within the homeless community that this incursion would be different... worse.

Tony's fears were confirmed and superseded: barely a dozen days after the "incident at Penn station," the infection (now broadcast as a biological terrorist attack) had taken a sizable bite out of Manhattan's population with almost sixty percent of the island's inhabitants infected (according to official polls) with people screaming for Richards and Stark to come up with a cure while both men presumably slaved away feverishly in their respective laboratories by night and tried to aid in the evacuation of uninfected civilians by day.

As things got bleaker and sixty percent moved up to sixty-five the majority of news networks repeatedly chanted the name 'Alex Mercer' over and over again, vilifying him as the sole culprit of the chaos while holding up the cities resident metahumans as great heroes struggling for the future of America (and the rest of the world too). Every so often one of their lookouts would spot Thor or the human torch etc flying laps to wherever the screaming was loudest.

The hope that sort of image gave to his friends was something Tony appreciated.

Frighteningly soon however, despite all their effort, even the metahumans were coming close to being overwhelmed; it was understandably terrifying to people that the fantastic four and the avengers combined were having trouble containing a virus (no attempt at cover-up could hide where the scales were tipping by this point).

There was a growing fear that some more potent strain would emerge out of nowhere and infect the super humans trying to help (it was a damn miracle that a hero hadn't fallen already), apparently that sentiment was shared by someone important too because both superhero teams were asked to pull back from the infected zones (with the same encouragement broadcast over the airwaves for any singular or unknown supers who might have remained unaffiliated despite the military's previous efforts at rallying them)

When the carnage came close enough for the screaming to be heard as background noise evacuation became top priority and the remainder of the population began a desperate scramble to escape Manhattan with a few remaining behind as volunteers for aid ('and as extra zombie fodder')

While most who were considered worth the effort were herded into temporary refugee camps over in Queens a few had to be left behind

'No more room' they said.

So Tony and a few others made plans with those few willing that had been similarly abandoned: the destitute, the homeless, the sick and the infirm, people who were unspokenly considered the least important or the most trouble and hadn't been able to buy their ticket out, (like Fisk)

Still, aside from a desperate holdout by S.H.I.E.L.D. on the coast the entire city was nigh on completely lost, most-all of the bridges had been bombed; all they could do was wait in the camps as they were sifted through as the marines and the 'masked guys' with them posted alongside S.H.I.E.L.D. made to find any of those able and ready to carry a gun (after being reconfirmed as uninfected of course)

Tony was never unfortunate enough to be drafted; he was quite old then, a measly bum's diet and years of steady atrophy made sure he could barely break into anything quicker than a hasty jog or lift much more than a small shopping cart's-worth of trash.

As many of his (younger) friends were separated from each other, many for the last time, there came a faint glimmer of hope: the background noise of screaming, explosions and the moans and cries of the infected, a dreadful cacophony that had become as familiar as a heartbeat began to recede ever so slightly back into the distance.

They still wouldn't answer his questions of course

Then later he found himself smiling, a contortion he'd thought the people had thoroughly lost the capacity for before he spotted iron man soaring overhead.

They were bringing the super heroes back.

That meant that something must've changed… for the better.

For a while after that first sighting nobody said a word; maybe things weren't getting better, maybe they were just so desperate they'd been forced to bring the supers back in some sort of last-ditch effort to stem the tide of the infection.

Then on the 23rd of January 2009, the horizon was bathed in the screaming light of a nuclear bomb.


	2. Chapter 1

Nick Fury sat dark and famously stern at the head of a large wooden table arranged in a surprisingly inconspicuous office; his mahogany skin was beset with wrinkles and discontent but otherwise impassive while his large paws were locked together into a collective fist. His singular eye scanned the room, calling upon years of hard-earned experience to detect any hint of unscrupulous influence.

Sat equally serious to his right was Steve Rogers, otherwise known as Captain America, clad in his full costume; his vibranium shield proudly rested in front of him, laid still under his tensed fingers. Out of all the inhabitants of the room he looked the most genuinely unhappy to be there.

Sat to his left with an expression Fury could only describe as trepid was Tony Stark, the Iron Man, also encased in his full body armour; his metal fingers were rapping out a steady beat of subtle clunks onto the tabletop.

Fury wasn't going to demean either of them and ask him to stop, not in their present company, there was too much at stake.

Opposite Fury's position stood one of the most grizzled men he'd ever seen, and he'd seen plenty: clad in thick, grey plating, militarily poised with his feet apart and hands firmly clenched behind his back; his robotic countenance was marred by several blade-like scars running in rake-like lances over his thin lips. His dull-grey eyes returned the director's scrutiny tenfold.

He was flanked on either side by a pair of not quite as imposing armed guards dressed just as professionally but much less heavily than he; their helmets were comprised of small, disc-eyed gas masks outfitted with thick, expensive rebreathers to filter out airborne contagions.

All they knew about him for certain was that his name was Cross and that he was extremely dangerous. Fury did his best to observe the man without glaring; from the subdued slip of malcontent in Cross' eye then, Fury developed a hunch that he felt just as precariously placed as they did.

Perhaps Cross' superiors had the same ideas as his.

Agents Hawkeye and Black Widow had been unable to attend due to 'business' (no matter how vociferously Blackwatch claimed that all the avengers needed to hear what they had to say)

Thor had professed... dissatisfaction about being dragged back to Earth to acquiesce the 'requests' of such a shadowy collective as blackwatch. He refused to be boxed into such a tiny space and was waiting outside, he would make sure that any attempt that anyone might make in subterfuge would be thwarted directly.

but Fury wasn't worried, Blackwatch weren't daft enough to try anything here; they needed S.H.I.E.L.D.'s cooperation for something.

Something important.

As Cross stiffly set up a deceptively crude looking projection board the fourth and final member of Fury's entourage: Doctor Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic began to fidget, Fury knew from the man himself that he had a little more information on the nature of this meeting but as expected he had been sworn to secrecy; once again Blackwatch intended everything to go their way here, they wanted to carefully control the information granted and how it was interpreted.

They'd done a damned job of it so far; the furthest Fury knew he was the only one on their side present who was even aware of their existence and even if what little information he had beyond that was good he knew he would have to consider himself lucky to know an inkling of their true nature.

The only defence against such an organisation in the circumstances Fury found himself in was an attentive eye and an objective mind, and he had two of the top thinkers of the present day in his company.

How was blackwatch planning to fool them if anyone at all?

Perhaps they'd decided that knowledge of this matter could be trusted in the hands of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Fat chance.

By now Cross had brought out a neat collection of documents and handed them to his guard who in turn passed them to all the others, including Fury.

Cross' voice was smoky and monotonous as he began the briefing.

"Mr Walters, gentlemen" Fury nodded at the name of his cover, it wouldn't keep them from suspecting him as something more but it was the only lead he'd give them.

"The details of your assignment you'll be able to read on the papers you've been handed, but I'll be giving you the general rundown just in case, but remember, you're only going to be told this once." His eyes took in his audience and his impression suddenly became threatening without his stance or his tone changing at all "any information exchanged here is to remain confidential, otherwise my superiors and I have the permission and capacity to systematically destroy each and every one of you, am I clear?"

Fury would've at least raised his eyebrows under other circumstances.

Before they'd left the helicarrier for this meeting the director had been very specific when he'd addressed his team about doing nothing to offend whomever 'Gentek' may have assigned to be their go-between, but he didn't think they would try such an overt tactic.

Apparently cross' methods weren't unanimously accepted though: one of his guards shifted ever so slightly in his boots while his counterpart began to absently finger the communications device on his chest.

Regardless of their inner feelings towards Cross' promise all the men in the room nodded an affirmative. Maybe it was a good thing Thor wasn't in here.

Cross, seemingly satisfied, stood aside from the projection board and allowed the small box fixed hastily to the ceiling to whirr quietly before it cast a sterile light on the white surface of the board; it blinked into an image of a face Fury had seen a couple times throughout his involvement in attempting to bring the recent attack of DX1118 under control.

Which had been difficult with Blackwatch having almost absolute control over intelligence regarding the disease as well as S.H.I.E.L.D's jurisdiction in the red zones.

Alex Mercer's pale face was shadowed by his large, grey hood; a pair of icy blue eyes stared out from the dark at Cross and his audience, rimmed with what might've been fatigue lines; his mouth was set into an emotionless line making his whole face look vapid and corpselike.

"I'll assume you've all heard of this man: Alex Mercer?" Richards was starting to look visibly uncomfortable even as he nodded with the rest of them again "The official story is that the doctor was killed in penn station, carrying a potent bio-weapon engineered by a known terrorist cell" he paused "DX1118, otherwise known as the blacklight virus"

"These claims are only partly true. Dr Franklyn, if you would?" Cross finished talking and a tall, wispy-haired woman who'd been hugging the darkest corners of the room until now suddenly moved to stand at the captain's side, she cleared her throat before revealing a voice as cold and clear as polar ice.

"Alex Mercer was cornered in Penn Station after taking a vial of DX1118, concealed in his coat pocket as insurance." The image switched to the chronological perspectives of a series of security cameras, revealing a paranoid-looking Alex Mercer dressed in the same getup as his previous image. From each camera shot they saw him shift through the crowds in the streets before heading down into the subway "He was tracked by our associates and cornered" sure enough there was Mercer backed up against a wall, the surrounding crowd had created a small arena where the squad of overdressed operatives looked to be attempting to reason with him "he refused to surrender. Before he was gunned down he smashed the vial and released the virus onto the city"

The footage stopped after Alex Mercer cast the vial to the concrete floor then shuddered violently as he was riddled with bullets.

Dr Franklyn's voice might have quavered with her next words "we thought Alex Mercer was dead, we were wrong".

They watched as the doctor awoke suddenly from a morgue autopsy table, scaring the surgeons half to death before he too stumbled clumsily out of frame.

"What you're about to see next may also be a little hard to grasp" he was almost offended, while he could damn well feel the resentment emanating from the scientists at that remark.

They'd just seen a man pull a Lazarus

The next set of viewings were from the seat of a standard military helicopter, through the restricted view of the orb windows it could've been anywhere in New York at this time. The passengers, marines from the looks of their uniforms, were making small talk over the radio to compensate for a heavy rumbling that could've been attributed to a variety of things.

"I'm telling you man it's got to be a bunch of them, all in that hoodie getup, runnin' around, causin' shit!" this first speaker was out of frame, could've been the one holding the camera but their voices were garbled under the static of the radio.

"C'mon sir, you know that shit's against regs" the smallest man turned as the camera swivelled to focus on him and made a small, throwaway gesture before returning to staring pensively out the window.

"Kid, I know what the hell I'm doing; some o' the guys just want a bit of documentation, something to make us look good for the folks back home, so hush up alright?" a pair of soldiers, one aside the cameraman and one next to the previous objector looked like they'd meant to oblige him and start singing before the helicopter jerked violently to and fro as though something had yanked hard on its tail, close to pushing and pulling the men right out of their seats to the point where they grunted and cried out as their seatbelts kept them from falling right into the doors.

The camera almost fell out of the commander's hand on the next lurch which looked to have been to the left this time (why the man hadn't reached for his gun or ordered his men to brace themselves was beyond Fury).

The radio was already swarmed with frantic orders and expletives as the groaning of the helicopter's hull became painfully shrill.

He caught the codename 'ZEUS' and a frightened declaration of a 'highjacking'

Then the left doors were torn off with a thunderous bang to reveal the streets of what looked to be Hell's Kitchen fast approaching; the cries of the soldiers were suddenly smothered out by the wind as Alex Mercer leapt in from the pilot's cabin and... grew blades of cold silver in place of fingers that cleaved smoothly through the nearest men, reducing them to bloody mush within seconds.

The few bullets that the others managed to bury in him as they fell screaming seemed to simply disappear into his body.

Before the feed was abruptly cut off when the copter smacked into the asphalt, Fury observed a set of black, red-veined tendrils drill into what used to be human.

Alex Mercer looked like he might as well have come straight from hell in that last frame which Cross had deliberately returned to and paused on.

The whole room had grown deathly still; both Stark and Rogers had turned as pale as anyone could expect them to, desperately clinging to what shreds of composure they still had (which were just enough to keep them looking respectable thankfully) while Reed had silently buried his face in his hands.

"What was that?" Fury on the other hand had somehow managed to become even more deadpan than Cross and he phrased the question like an order.

Before Dr Franklyn had even cleared her throat to respond however Cross stepped forward and obliged him instead, "the modified virus rewrote his genetic code and reanimated his corpse to an extent we don't fully understand; Alex Mercer was a veritable genius before he became this thing and now he's a living weapon, we have no idea just how far he went with it. and we have reason to believe that he's still at large"

"That's why you need our help, to stop him." said Captain America who had locked eyes with Cross'.

"yes" he replied.

"do you have any idea where he might be?" said Tony

"yes"

"there's one more thing you should all know, it concerns our methods of locating him" Richards finally spoke up and presented their inquisitive faces with the expression of a man stuck in the path of a speeding car.

"it's not just his body he can change, there's a very good reason none of you ever encountered him before during these past few weeks"

"the same reason you and your team did?"

"yes, it concerns the methods we'll be using to track him down and defeat him, there's only one weapon that's been proven to incapacitate Alex Mercer, even temporarily".

The weather on that day was unpleasant enough to incorporate rain with the cold forcing Tony and his friends to huddle closer together and draw their coats over each other, and as per what had recently become the usual there was only one person missing.

"H-hey Al, you okay?" Tony chattered meekly and pulled his ragged coat as firmly around him as it would go as another bone-chilling breeze tightened his frail muscles and wrinkled the tails and tears of his trousers.

He resisted the urge to gasp even as the woman to his right put her arm around his shoulder and offered him a sad smile.

'Al' was standing away from the rest, in the crossroads between the alleyway and the street: his black coat and grey hood had become thoroughly soaked yet he was showing no signs of being at all bothered by the unforgiving cold, he turned to Tony and though his voice was as soft as Tony had ever heard it he still wanted to cower before those eyes of his, glinting at him even through the darkness and the rain.

"I'm fine Tony" he spoke gravelly "just fine" .


	3. Chapter 3

By the time the search parties had been organised and appropriate personnel properly relegated, winter was settling in for the long haul; the devastated wastelands of the big apple were blanketed in a thick, sombre coat of snow that mingled with the choking ash and the charred scaffolding of tanks and infected to create a gruesome, macabre effigy of what was once New York.

Even with the eminent re-conquest of the big apple the nights had been getting any safer: the choking, ashen rain and scads of infected carrion introduced an alarming rate of lethal disease and respiratory infection, and with the redlight virus dying off faster than originally projected some of the less than savoury characters that survived or fled the outbreak had slithered, unnoticed, back into this 'unclaimed' territory: a city-wide maze of lifeless, ruined streets sporadically patrolled by a ravaged military and the occasional superhero force had bred a veritable hive for criminal scum, a true nightmare for the unfortunates that'd been scraping by on mouldy rations and snow, lucky (or unlucky) enough to have remained and survived this far.

After a consternated takeover, within the window the military created when they seemingly withdrew for the most part from their city bases to lick their wounds, the established criminal clicks collaboratively sealed gawkish quarantines around the most remote and destitute communities, then they procured a rowdy collection of thugs to organise protection rackets. Without money or food to offer however, most of its victims ended up conscripted as labour, meat or shot dead to conserve resources, their piling corpses staining the hard frost on the pavement

These bodies were then stripped of clothes and valuables and either posed as a warning outside the camps or left where they fell if time was an issue.

Blackwatch had once again forbidden S.H.I.E.L.D. from doing anything about it: said that most of their suspected Mercers hid amongst these people, as abhorrent in his eyes as it was even Stark had to admit it was the perfect place for a hunter to lay low: a plentiful supply of accidents and executions to mask its own kills and a veritable sea of people to hide in, if they tried to clean it up they'd stretch their resources thin trying to contain the subsequent chaos.

Mercer would have no trouble slipping out of their grasp.

Thus, to ensure his capture, with a minimum of civilian endangerment, (an addendum insisted on by himself and the other available avengers) the plan was simple: each individual superhero had been assigned to separate teams each carrying a sample of a cancer based pathogen designed to incapacitate and nullify Mercer's powers.

The search teams were to scour the most likely nooks and crannies across the criminal controlled and unclaimed parts of the city using technology designed by Blackwatch to find any and all traces of the virus, specifically ones containing the markers that set the Mercer strain apart from the standard redlight virus; at a loss for data regarding what apparently constituted as 'viable' however, Stark had discreetly worked to link the live readings of the scanner accompanying him into his helmet's display and as a result had been able to zero in on the most auspicious signal first.

Once Alex Mercer had been found and drawn out all available superheroes would rendezvous on the location of whosoever sent out the signal as soon as possible and engage the target until the bio weapon could be introduced; the fantastic four were out in full force, escorted by a platoon of military helicopters, their job would be to work in conjunction with the others to drive Mercer away from any bridges and corner him against the bay should he get an opportunity to try and escape.

Fury knew and had admitted to them in private that the actual fight was not the only thing they should be worried about: Cross had been concernedly specific about taking Mercer into Blackwatch custody when they finally managed to incapacitate him, there was an agreement made that S.H.I.E.L.D. would only contain him for a temporary duration before he'd be moved out to some top secret facility.

Naturally Fury had expressed his reservations about the implications of being kept in the dark on this again vociferously, and, surprisingly, his superiors apparently felt the same way because they actually listened to him and together had decided on several ways to delay Alex's transfer once he was captured.

They had quite a few questions for… it.

Iron man had been burdened with arguably the most precarious job: with the speed and manoeuvrability of his armour far outstripping that of any blackwatch chopper he had been posthumously assigned the status of a 'solo operative', he felt his 'heart' hammering beneath his armoured chasse as a bar symbolising the detection of viral tissue rose to the rate he'd been inexplicitly told to worry about; it was just his luck to be the first one to actually find the murderous, super powered, mutant virus monster.

Nonetheless he swallowed his fear, let out the silent signal to the others and began his descent.

Far below him, in a secluded neighbourhood huddled one of the tamer camps this side of what was once Times Square, buzzing and shifting like a swarm of insects.

The crowd looked as though they'd been recently herded here and forced to bunch up outside an apartment building, the only structure lit for miles, its windows and doors emitted a lonely glow onto the wretched mass of homeless men and women.

What exactly was going in here? Why would Mercer be here?

He'd made enough last minute adjustments and contingency supplements to his armour to make a college examinee blush. In an effort to combat Alex Mercer's unique and soil-yourself-scary powers of biomass absorption the mark IV's joints had been doubly reinforced and coated with a blackwatch chemical weapon called bloodtox, which had supposedly acted as a deterrent to all strains of redlight, including Alex Mercer during the original pandemic.

He was as prepared for this fight as he possibly could be considering the poor Intel and strenuous circumstances but that didn't mean he wasn't worried; Steve had vehemently insisted on assignment to the team closest to his search route, which Stark was very grateful for, he'd never admit that of course, but right then he would've given anything to have his husband standing there by his side when he carefully lowered himself onto the street, stirring up wispy clouds around his boots from the emancipated asphalt.

His scanner, a small autonomous little unit, suspended under a rudimentary propeller began to beep frantically and Stark watched as his HUD pointed him to the only man amongst them who seemed completely unperturbed by the commotion as he rose over the hunched backs and shoulders of the surrounding humans like a lion rises over the grass.

He parted the crowd like reeds and quietly advanced on stark at an agonisingly slow pace. His shadowed expression looked no different than when it had been glaring at him on the screen in the secret conference room several days ago: hooded, emotionless, dead-eyes set firmly ahead.

Everyone in the crowd suddenly fell silent as Alex Mercer dropped all his pretences and stalked towards Tony Stark who watched as they looked to him with fear and reverence; Alex's eyes locked on Iron man even as Iron man's targeting systems locked on him and when he suddenly stopped and made no further moves Stark resorted to doing what he did best.

"So uh, you come here often, buddy?"

Alex was silent.

"Right to the point then, I like that..." iron man would've shifted nervously if he weren't in his armour, Alex Mercer seemed to exude 'unsettling' without even trying to "yeah uh... look, that whole city-wide zombie pandemic thing you stirred up kind of rubbed a few people the wrong way, so no offense or anything but I'm sort of here to take you in"

Alex, again, said nothing.

"Now I know it's a little sudden, I'm sure you had very important plans and I completely respect that but this is pretty important too, so if you could just surrender immediately and come quietly without a fuss that'd be great" despite the nigh-on palpable unease Stark had managed to leisurely slip into a well exercised condescending stance and tone, he was used to baiting dangerous people like this.

Alex continued to remain unnaturally still.

Iron Man suddenly let himself grow serious. "My team is on its way here y'know, I don't care how tough they say you are but I know for a fact that you can't stand up to the entire Avengers team, so why don't you save us both a heap of time and trouble and just give up now?"

Alex robotically shifted his feet apart and took on a basic combat stance, finally he spoke, with a cold, level voice that complimented the patches of ash and what might have been blood pocked across his jacket.

"Then I guess I'll just have to kill you quickly"

A/N (1. I emphatically apologize for taking so long to update for what little it's worth and 2. the full fight between Mercer and Stark shall take place in the next chapter so no more stupid cliff-hangers like this until the battle's run its course.)


	4. Chapter 4: Iron Man vs Alex Mercer

Stark grunted as Alex Mercer tackled him with enough force to rival a charging freight train. The two of them struck against the pavement and kept going, dragged by the remaining momentum they carved a pipe shaped valley through the street and disturbed enough dust and debris to smother the boulevard in a thick, brown fog.

Stark reacted on his impulses. When Alex Mercer straddled him and raised a fist to strike he was met with a high-powered repulsor blast to the chest, point-blank, at an angle that sent him flying over Stark's head to crumple the ruins of an abandoned vehicle fused to the sidewalk in some previous explosion.

The Iron Man wasted no time getting to his feet and rose to a surveyable height, Alex Mercer showing up through the smoke as a small thermal blob through a cloud of dark-blueness.

The Avenger casually lifted an arm and loosed a single concussive missile that weaved a meandering trail through the smoke and sent mercer tumbling away in a strident bark of force and sound.

Convinced his enemy would be indisposed long enough to check, a particularly loud outcry caught Stark's attention and he turned to hover at a slight lean.

The previous crowd had almost completely dispersed now, most of them shouting and crying out terrified as blind panic sent them in all directions, scrambling and potentially trampling over each other; it was hard to tell clearly if anyone was hurt in thermal, especially while also trying to keep an eye on Mercer. The crowd had fused into a white mass

As an Avenger with team-mates closing in fast however Stark made his decision quickly and was about ready to try and calm the frantic crowd before he was suddenly seized around the waist and sent to the ground with a forceful thud that shuddered the foundations of the surrounding block and punched an Iron Man sized crater into the desiccated asphalt.

He cursed at the new pressure in his hip as the thick, black tendril, contracting inflexibly around his waist, raised him up about half a story and smacked him down twice more into the same exacerbated crater before he could try to burn it away.

Iron Man's suit let out a subtle noise as suddenly Alex's limb went taught and Stark almost cried out at the sudden flex in his back as he was snapped out of his hold and thrown by his opponent towards his opponent.

Stark was granted only a nanosecond's showing of Alex mercer's free arm shifting and bulging into a black, boulder-sized cudgel that tore through the air and smashed into his armour with a bellowing strike loud enough to damage the naked human ear before he was cast across the street into one of the old houses, which posthumously collapsed on him.

The building's destruction was nothing to worry about: Iron Man's armour had survived nigh on implausible amounts of force plenty of times before; flimsy wood and asbestos-ridden plaster was hardly even nuisance to him.

The rubble that he was buried under was pushed off almost nonchalantly and Mercer was greeted with a quite unscathed Iron Man strolling pleasantly out of the ruins, brushing a stain of dust off his crimson shoulder.

'Y'know…' he began, the smile on his lips audible in his voice 'if this is what you constitute as killing someone quickly I shudder to think what happens when you decide to take your time'

Alex said nothing but his glare could be aptly described as murderous. He hunched into a crouch that he soon had to dive out of when Iron Man took brief aim and fired off a series of lowly charged palm lasers at him with an intermittent missile to keep things interesting.

Stark's attacks however were not intended to severely damage, no use wasting his power when his backup was mere minutes away; nonetheless he made an effort to keep up an air of growing frustration. As Mercer practically danced around him he spouted colourful profanities and witty gripes that were just loud enough to hear. The monster himself leapt over lasers, hopped around explosions and ducked underneath shells, everything Iron Man sent his way, until the intended end result was soon achieved. Slowly but surely, Mercer was gracefully corralled to the end of the street and onto the carcass of a roundabout Stark had spied before the battle had begun: it was a clear, open battleground where the avengers could reliably gather and work together to bring Mercer down.

Alex had seemingly become secure in his agility and coolly bounded backwards into the middle of the square with his pale hands holstered in his trouser pockets. His eyes never once left Stark, who once again took to the skies and hovered assuredly, levelling Alex with a look of his own.

Then things suddenly got deathly quiet again.

For an extensive moment, no sound beyond the background noise of the surrounding city could be heard: there were distant whines of ambulance sirens, a recent and welcome replacement to the previous barking of gunshots and broken, chorused screams.

Stark once found himself sure he'd heard the howling of a dog.

Alex, in his exuberant silence, had become still, almost tranquilly so, as if he was listening to a song that no one else could hear; Iron Man decided that if Alex was going to make no move to attack or escape there was nothing else to do but settle and wait, though he remained airborne.

'Your friends are almost here' said Alex in an audible whisper.

'Finally decided to give up?' he replied, his voice sounding uncomfortably loud as it echoed around the colourless clearing.

Alex's low answer came a little while later, after a couple of seconds had passed, as if his movement was not all that had slowed in him.

'No, thank you,' his head swivelled as smoothly and ponderously as a cat's to lock his eyes on something faraway. 'I appreciate the offer though Stark, most prefer to try and kill me outright when they find me' his brow tensed ever so slightly as what Stark presumed were memories drifted listlessly across his small expression.

Stark now felt slightly confused: the Alex Mercer he'd been briefed on was not recorded as a brooding, taciturn character, more as a highly intelligent force of violent destruction and so far he'd certainly fulfilled his violent destruction quota but in doing so had acted in a way that was a far cry from the ruthless intelligence advertised in his files: he had immediately broken his cover to fight Iron Man, likely with full knowledge of the Avengers closing in on him from the start, unless Alex Mercer was actually a moron and they'd been lied to, what was he playing at?.

Then Alex smirked as faintly as he'd spoken 'I'm just enjoying the silence while it lasts'.

As he quieted again Stark watched him grow tense and retrained his aim, but even his armour-enhanced reflexes weren't enough to react fast enough to the speed at which Mercer twisted into the air and violently burst his arms into a giant, black shield to block the blow of the hammer that sent him crashing through several blocks of weary brick and mortar until he was over three streets away.

Stark blinked out of a revere that he hadn't realised he'd slipped into as Thor moved up to greet him with a hearty 'ho there!' and a powerful arm stretched out to beckon mojlnir.

'Well, you sure took your time' chuckled Iron Man.

'My apologies' replied Thor.

'I was being sarcastic, you actually got here before Cap y'know, that's... that's pretty surprising' even if he could fly.

'Now is not the time for levity'

'Humour has no schedule, buddy'

Thor, to his credit tried to push out a smirk but the result looked more like a sneer; Stark was beginning to worry that their debriefing on Mercer may have left his comrades more shaken than he'd expected.

He'd also pushed Mercer out of Stark's intended not-so-much-kill-as-take-down-zone.

'I would appreciate no distractions, friend Tony' said Thor briefly, grimly.

As much as Stark was worried, Thor was right (and stuffy as usual), there would be plenty of time for personal chit chat later anyway. Alex had yet to bring anything to the table that Stark would consider an serious threat to himself or his fellow avengers, heck, he'd been able to hold his own just fine so far, if he did say so himself; despite that however there was an uneasy feeling in the air that all was not as it seemed, it made his intuitions squirm and he suspected his teammate felt it as well.

He and Thor took off without another word and arced around the latest mushroom cloud that had bloomed three streets away from where they'd rendezvoused. They set themselves up on either side of the road.

Thor scanned the cloud with a keen Asguardian eye so Iron Man (now out of thermals to see things in nice, clear Technicolor) deferred to his judgement when he charged, headlong into the fog before a bellowing crash echoed around the vicinity.

there was a set of thunderous strikes that boomed and smacked beneath the obscurity before Thor was tossed out of the fog straight into Iron Man, sending them both tumbling to the ground.

Stark didn't have time to make a joke before Thor was dragged off him and thrown somewhere out of sight, to be replaced by Mercer, whose eyes lowered and regarded him with some inhuman emotion.

Alex sealed his arms to the asphalt with a pair of trunk like appendages that crashed onto his biceps and immediately tensed a set of thick, grey digits at their length.

then Iron Man heard his armour groan and a twinge of genuine fear twisted his heart.

He made to push his boots into Alex's chest and set his thrusters to maximum.

Mercer's chest and stomach were suddenly encased in armour making the virus-infected abomination looking suitably demonic as the fire lit up his bloody face.

Alex somehow managed to make his cold, harsh voice heard over the roar of Iron Man's suit's engines "I'm taking you out of the fight, Stark"

White hot pain exploded outward from his arms and Tony Stark screamed with his mauled armour.

Stark soon couldn't hear anything else as agony and a sudden influx of painkillers left the world mute; Alex was knocked off of him by a livid Captain America's shield as the ground began to rumble when an Asguardian god set his hammer to work and a great, green behemoth approached in leaps and bounds.

-(A/N) Okay yes I said I'd finish the fight so I know this is kind of cheating, just finishing Alex's fight with Iron Man, but rest assured: I haven't given up on this story yet, I have a plan and everything, reviews are nice, they let me know if I'm doing enough to entertain you or not.-


End file.
